With record revenue of R$9.38 billion in just 24 hours and 14.4 million orders registered, Black Friday 2024 established itself as the biggest event in Brazilian e-commerce, according to data from the Hora a Hora dashboard. Besides the significant increase in sales volume, the date brought significant technical challenges: 55% of retailers reported slow or unstable systems, and 40% of these issues were attributed to failures in critical APIs, according to the FGV Electronic Commerce Yearbook.
Given this highly complex operational scenario, practices such as Continuous Testing and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) have gained ground as essential tools for ensuring availability, security, and performance. These approaches allow us to anticipate failures before they reach production, automate large-scale validations, and maintain resilience even in extreme peak situations.
Vericode a software quality specialist, has been directly involved in this process. In 2024, the company led the preparation of Grupo Casas Bahia's infrastructure for Black Friday, simulating 20 million simultaneous users with the K6 tool and real-time monitoring via Grafana. The operation faced peaks of up to 15 million requests per minute, maintaining stability and performance throughout the shopping journey.
For this year's Black Friday, the company expects the application of artificial intelligence to automated testing and observability to gain even more prominence. AI-based solutions promise to predict bottlenecks more accurately, adjust workflows in real time, and expand test coverage with less human effort, raising the bar for quality and efficiency in digital operations.
Joab Júnior, partner at Vericode and a specialist in software testing and reliability engineering, emphasizes the importance of advanced practices to ensure stability during times of high demand: "Supporting millions of simultaneous requests is only possible with advance preparation, continuous automation, and consolidated SRE practices. This reduces the risk of critical failures, ensures the integrity of the digital experience, and preserves revenue," he explains.
In addition to load testing and monitoring, Vericode also invests in solutions such as dott.ai low-code test automation platform . The tool accelerates deliveries without sacrificing technical governance, contributing to system stability even during critical periods like Black Friday or launches with high traffic volumes.
According to a survey by Neotrust Confi, search endpoints at large retailers reached 3 million requests per minute at their peak in 2024. The adoption of automated pipelines, continuous regression testing, and active observability has become standard among companies seeking competitiveness and operational continuity during the most demanding periods of the commercial calendar.
For Joab Júnior , this scenario requires a change in mindset within technology teams: "The volume of access is increasingly unpredictable, and the only way to respond effectively is by integrating quality from the beginning of the development cycle. It's not just about testing more, but about testing better, with intelligence, automation, and a focus on reliability."
